


Infinities of Reflection

by Muccamukk



Category: Babylon 5
Genre: Alien Mythology/Religion, Cultural Differences, Earth-Minbari War, F/F, Fictional Religion & Theology, Ghosts, Grief/Mourning, Guilt, Introspection, Pre-Canon, Season 01, Souls
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-31
Updated: 2018-10-31
Packaged: 2019-08-06 02:34:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16379792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Muccamukk/pseuds/Muccamukk
Summary: Before the war with Earth, on its ending, and in its wake, Delenn contemplates the dead.





	Infinities of Reflection

**Author's Note:**

  * For [silveradept](https://archiveofourown.org/users/silveradept/gifts).



> Big thank you to Nenya for listening to me scream about this for a month, and then beta reading it. It made a huge difference.

_Minbari, pale, bloodless. Look in their eyes and see nothing but mirrors, infinities of reflection._  
—Renegade Soul Hunter in "Soul Hunter"

*** * ***

It was after, when they were sated and looking off the balcony over the crystal valleys of Tuzanor, that Delenn asked, "Tell me, what did you learn on your voyages through the stars?"

Mayan rolled onto her back and looked up at the ceiling as though she could see all the starlanes she had travelled in the last cycle. "I saw stars," she said, and Delenn laughed and leaned down to cover Mayan's lips with her own.

"To see stars you travelled a hundred and twenty one systems?" Delenn asked, when they were finished with the kiss.

Mayan smiled up at her. "They were stars worth the voyage," she said, "such stars as you only see reflected in the eyes of a child."

"And what else?" Delenn asked. A dedicate of the temple, she had never left Minbar, and likely never would. Not unless she was finally accepted as an acolyte of the Grey Council, and then she would stay on the Council ship, and never walk the soil of foreign worlds. Delenn was content with that, happy to explore each small corner of her home world as it came to her. Each street of each city was worth a lifetime of study, or so Mayan had said, before the dream of stars had overtaken her. "Come, you must tell me everything."

"I met a Centauri telepath," Mayan said, relenting and giving the sort of concrete details that she knew Delenn wanted. "Some of them are holy women and prophetesses, did you know that? They study in the temple of a god whose name I do not remember, and serve the great houses but not the people."

Delenn had met a Centauri once, a very tiresome man, and could think of little that might be holy about them, but Mayan had clearly seen what Delenn could not. "I did not know that. Did you speak with her?"

Mayan rolled on her side so that her forehead brushed Delenn's and her knee slipped between Delenn's legs. "We talked for many hours," she said. "I learned of her training, and of her gods, whose names I do not remember, and of her mission. She was travelling home after meeting a new race, one of those young peoples the Centauri tend to collect."

Delenn had always thought the younger races were better off finding their own way into the stars, but the Centauri had never been a species to leave well enough alone, especially not when it was of benefit to their ruling houses. "'Ducats'" she said allowed, trying out the word. Delenn had been toying with learning Centauri, but it was an impossible language for an impossible people. Branmer kept trying to tell her that she had a mind perfectly shaped for the diplomatic service, but Delenn didn't think she would like a posting anywhere off world at all, let alone Centauri Prime. She felt that her duty pulled her in a different direction.

"Yes, 'ducats,'" Mayan said, laughing again. "But, Delenn, she told me something else, something strange, and I have been trying to work it into a poem, but I don't know the shape of it yet."

The experience of a lifetime of friendship told Delenn that Mayan would turn this over and over in her mind until it was smooth and polished and perfect as a river stone. "Tell me of it," Delenn said.

"She said they name their planet after the soil they till, though it is a world made of oceans. Oh, you should see an ocean from the deck of a watercraft, Delenn. Two cycles since Centauri Prime, and I have not yet been able to describe it."

"I have seen pictures," Delenn said, but even she could feel something different in Mayan's fumbling attempts to shape words to nature, a scent at the edge of her senses. No one but the Worker Caste travelled on the ice-clogged seas of Minbar, and they only when they had to. This was a sidetrack, however, a poet's mind gathering dropped crystals like a sharten bowerbuilder. "What else did she tell you?"

"She told me that the people of this tilled-soil world carry their dead with them." Mayan traced concentric circles on Delenn's bare hip, the map of a solar system. Delenn tried to tell which one by the feel of it.

"As with the Star Riders' cortèges?" Delenn asked. Branmer had mocked those, though they were his father's clan. He said that the longer it had been since a war, the more pomp the Warrior Caste put into their funerals, as though they needed to remind everyone that they had a purpose when stoic silence would do that just as well.

"No," Mayan said, drawing out the word. "It sounded different, she spoke as though it was the soul not the body, but not as with the Shagh-toth. I did not understand her, and she would not say more. The Grey Council could learn from how Centauri prophetesses cultivate mystery."

Delenn took a sharp breath. "You have been away too long," she said, the censure clear in her voice. There was such a thing as too much irreverence, even from a poet.

"You have not been away enough," Mayan countered, but she leaned up and kissed Delenn before she could say anything else.

*** * ***

Delenn didn't especially consider Mayan's rumours for almost fifteen cycles, though she did endure several disjointed attempts to put the concept to poetry. It was after she'd been the deciding vote in launching a holy war to wipe out the humans that she learned the name of their planet. It wasn't the first twinge of regret that Delenn felt about her choice, but it was the first that made her wonder what Mayan would think of her war.

Not that she had to wonder, not really.

Even then, the Grey Council did not see those it sought to destroy. Even as Delenn's shame grew, she did not come face to face with her victims more than once until the last day of the war.

Then, she stood on the deck of a cruiser above the ocean-planet called Earth, and looked at the third human she'd ever seen, and the first she'd studied.

The acolytes had stripped him of his uniform, and Delenn had examined it and the contents of his ship. He seemed to carry no talisman or symbol other than obvious military badges. Nothing of the dead was there with him.

What had the Centauri prophetess meant? Delenn wondered, but had no way to ask. She had learned a little of one or two of the human languages, but not enough to question religion, and the human was reciting some incantation of numbers anyway.

It was the Religious Caste that had tortured him, old rituals unused in centuries, but that was not what made Delenn's breath catch when she saw him. He slumped forward, trying to look stoic through his pain, looking up at her but eyes half obscured by the brown filaments covering his head. But his eyes, his eyes were the same piercing brown as Mayan's. His eyes were Minbari eyes, and Delenn could not look away.

She was hooded, as the others were, all their faces in shadow, so she could not see if they saw what she did.

Then the triluminary was held up to the prisoner, and the fate of the universe changed.

The souls of humans and the souls of Minbari were the same. The great river had branched, and like the old joke about the man and the fish, they Grey Council had not realised they were eating themselves.

The dead the humans carried with them, somehow, were Minbari dead as well.

*** * ***

Mayan performed a ti'la at Delenn's father's funeral. It was a simple service: A cremation, a prayer, the poem, only a few close friends, small in the centre of the city's greatest temple. Branmer left as soon as it was over, but Mayan lingered until only she and Delenn remained.

"Thank you," Delenn said, and Mayan pressed her hand to Delenn's chest, the way she hadn't in all the long days of the war. "Thank you." That seemed like all Delenn could say. She wished that Mayan's touch would never leave her.

Mayan could not know that Delenn had started the war of holy genocide—just as her father couldn't have, or so she prayed—but everyone knew that Delenn was Satai, and that the Grey Council had ordered the war. That had been enough to break both Mayan's heart and Delenn's father's.

"Oh, Delenn," Mayan said, and her hand didn't move. "Come home with me."

Delenn didn't have time. She hadn't had time for the funeral, not with the chaos that had followed her surrender order tearing Minbar apart. "Of course," she said. "I would like nothing more."

Mayan lived near enough the Great Temple of Tuzanor that it was simpler to walk. Their fingers touched as they moved, and Delenn looked about the city to see what changes the war might have brought. She could see none. It was still her City of Sorrows, preserved in eternal crystal.

"That poem, 'Dawn at the River,'" Delenn said, after a while, "it is about the humans, is it not?"

As pointed as that had felt at the father of a Satai's funeral, Delenn also knew it was what he would have wanted.

For a moment, Mayan didn't answer. They were almost at the entry way to her apartment when she said, "In a way, I suppose."

"In what way is it not?" Delenn asked, following Mayan up the winding steps. How many times had she climbed these stairs, pulled along in Mayan's wake? How many times had they sat on this balcony and discussed poetry? Easier to remember that than the temple or the war.

"One could say that as with even the sun's light on the river, the reflection alters depending on where one stands." Inside, Mayan slipped off the outer layer of her robes and sat on the edge of her bed. Even now, on the verge of becoming a Shaal, she hadn't accepted more living space. She said she loved this one room with its view of Tuzanor, and would never give it up.

Delenn stood with her back to the view of the valleys, hands folded into her sleeves. She thought for a moment that Mayan meant that as a rebuke, but she would not be unkind, not on this day, and Delenn should not either. She said nothing, instead.

"I speak of shared experience," Mayan said, softening her poem as she never had before. "You remember our talk long ago of the people of Earth and how they carry their dead, and when you hear me read a poem, you think of it."

"Yes," Delenn agreed, though equivocally. She wished suddenly that she could tell Mayan about the human captive, and how she'd seen her oldest friend in his eyes. Delenn wished with all her soul that she could tell anyone she loved about any part of the war, how it had started, or why it had ended.

"Did you ever meet a human?" Mayan asked. "I wished to, but it was not permitted."

Delenn crossed the room and sat beside her, the warmth of their bodies mingling through layers of silk. "Perhaps," she said, "You will be able to now. You will have to tell me what you think of them."

"When the time is right," Mayan said. She sprang up and began to busy herself the tea she'd initially forgotten to offer. Before, she'd never remember, and Delenn had never cared.

"Tell me of other reflections upon the water," Delenn said. She could not in either good conscience or good manners change the subject completely. "Were I standing in a different place, what might I see?"

"I have been thinking since that prophetess of all the ways of carrying one's dead," Mayan said, voice lifted over the precise clink of cups. "The Star Riders, certainly, or the Shagh-toth,"—they both shuddered slightly—"but what of the river of souls? Do we not carry in each of us the hope to be reborn next to the ones we hold most dear? Do we not wish to carry on our voyage together?"

Delenn considered this. It was what she had always believed, certainly. Though she had been taught that it was pure arrogance to wish for a reunion in the life beyond death or to think that mere longing could shape the destiny of souls. On this day of all days, Delenn could not lie. "I do," she said.

"Do we not carry the hope that all sentiments left unvoiced will be understood?" Mayan came back to the bed carrying her old chipped tea set, the one they'd shared a hundred times, and would never be offered to guests. She poured the tea, first for Delenn and then for herself.

Delenn reached for a cup, but when she picked it up her hand shook so badly that tea sloshed over the rim of the tiny cup, scalding her hand. She did not let go—she would not risk breaking this precious, battered cup—but she did not set it down either. Delenn looked at the cup, now almost empty, then up into Mayan's eyes.

"Delenn, my oldest dearest friend," Mayan said, her voice an infinity of softness. She took the teacup from Delenn's hand and put it down on the tray, and then, very slowly, Mayan lifted Delenn's fingers to her mouth and sucked lightly where the tea had burned her. Mayan's mouth was cool and familiar, and hadn't kissed Delenn in so many cycles. Delenn closed her eyes and sighed.

It was too much. Delenn wanted to weep, to rage like she had for Dukhat, to start another war and burn another civilisation to ashes, but she could not weep and she would not rage, not any more. She sat as still as a temple statue and let Mayan touch her as though she were alive.

When Mayan dropped her hand, Delenn curled it against her chest. "I am sorry," she said, wishing it wasn't far, far too late for that. She thought of that captive human and how at the end he'd torn her hood from her head and stared into her eyes. She wondered if the human had been able to see the dead she carried with her.

*** * ***

After five cycles folded into the Grey Council, the last human Delenn had seen was also the first on her return to the wider universe.

The Minbari delegation arrived on Babylon 5 mere days after the humans announced that the last of the Babylon stations was finally operational. Its new commander was there to meet it. He stood stiff and formal in his military uniform—why were Earth Alliance uniforms and Warrior Caste robes so similar?—his face a perfect mask. 

"Welcome to Babylon 5, Ambassador," Sinclair said mildly and bowed. He was perfectly polite, but Delenn wondered if she had been the last Minbari he'd seen, though of course he wouldn't remember that. Or would he? The acolytes had wiped his memory to the best of their ability, but the technology was not meant for humans. Delenn searched his face for signs of recognition, but saw nothing.

"Thank you, Commander," Delenn replied, returning the bow. His language still came thickly on her lips—though it was easier than Centauri. She'd been learning English for the last few years, and a few other human languages besides, but didn't understand many of the words. The cultural files gathered by the Warrior Caste lacked detail, and the Religious Caste's attempts to interpret them had only made a worse mess, piling supposition on misunderstanding. Of course, the Grey Council could have asked the humans for information, but that would have involved admitting they did not have it already, and Delenn was left with her dictionaries and suppositions.

 _Haunt_ and _ghost_ were a human words, ones that Delenn had come across as she'd learned the language. They had no translation cues in her translation dictionary, and stood only on their self-referential description via other English words: Dead that linger, disembodied souls. Minbari souls? Was that why the river had been seeming to run dry?

"May I show the ambassadorial quarters?" Sinclair asked. His security chief looked sideways at Sinclair and narrowed his eyes slightly, unhappy, but said nothing. He fell away as Delenn followed Sinclair through the station.

The embarkation area buzzed with worker caste humans—no, they didn't have castes, just humans working—and as Delenn and her staff passed, the humans stopped and stared. Had they ever seen her people since the war? There were no other species present, and the station smelled of burned steel and wet paint.

Sinclair was talking about the Babylon Project, sounding proud of his new assignment, unaware of how he had come by it. Delenn listened politely, glad that the strain of their meeting had passed.

He was taking what he called the "scenic route," so Delenn had time to consider her question before she asked. They were walking through what would some day be a marketplace when she finally said, "Commander Sinclair, may I ask you for a very great favour?"

She did not look at him, but heard his breathing change as his body stiffened. "It would depend what favour," he said.

"I am still learning your language," Delenn told him, regretting that she had put him back on guard, "and I have discovered that some of your cultural words are not sufficiently explained in our archives. From time to time, might I come to you for an explanation?"

Now she did look at him, and saw his shoulders drop and a small smile ease his face. Had he expected her to ask him to sell his homeworld? "I can try," he said, "but you will find that those kinds of questions have more than one answer, depending on who you ask. That may be why your files are so inconclusive."

"Our files say that your people have a hundred different religious castes," Delenn said. "May I ask to which you belong?"

Sinclair hesitated, but he was still smiling. Delenn had the impression that he thought she was younger than she was, a novitiate ambassador on her first assignment. "That's often considered a personal question," he said, "but I was raised as a Catholic."

"I see." Delenn tried to remember if she'd read anything about Catholics, but could not recall any references to them. There had been only the barest references to the major groups.

"That's a type of Christian," Sinclair clarified, seeming to sense her confusion. "This way, Ambassador," he added, and they got into a lift. The tour, it seemed, had come to an end.

"Thank you, Commander," Delenn said. "Someday, when time permits, I may ask you more about that." After she looked it up on the Babylon 5 cultural database that the humans had promised.

"When time permits," Sinclair agreed placidly. The Minbari wing of the ambassadorial quarters was near the lift. "Here we are," Sinclair said, gesturing to a door.

It was grey. Everything here was grey. Her apartments were also a grey canvas on which she might paint. Delenn would have to order more supplies from Minbar than she'd initially anticipated, least her staff be driven to despair by the cell-like walls.

Sinclair was standing in the doorway, clearly waiting for an opinion. "These will be sufficient," Delenn told him. "Thank you for escorting me, Commander."

"Of course, Ambassador," Sinclair said, inclining his head. "Contact myself or Lieutenant Commander Takashima if there is anything you require."

He clearly considered himself dismissed, and Delenn could think of nothing to make him stay. He left, and Delenn turned to the glowing computer screen and started to ask questions.

The answers she found in the Babylon 5 cultural database horrified her.

*** * ***

"You never told me how intriguing this place is," Mayan said almost two cycles later. They were in Delenn's quarters, Lennier dismissed, tea set out.

Delenn smiled from behind her cup, heart lightened to know that they were not ambassador and Shaal, nor Satai and poet, but two friends reunited. "You never asked," she said. "I meant to show you, but you took so long to visit."

"Would that I had come sooner," Mayan said. She lay back onto her couch, truly still, in a way that she hadn't been capable of the last time Delenn had seen her. Four cycles, and Mayan had blossomed into the confidence and beauty of a grown woman.

"We have changed places, you and I," Delenn said. "Now I voyage through the stars while you set roots at home."

Mayan shrugged lightly. "I had thought that my art would help heal the wounds left by the war."

Many cycles, and Delenn could hear that without the slightest feeling showing on her face. "Has it done so, do you think?"

"Perhaps, with some, within our caste. I have done all I can do without visiting Earth. I purpose to build a bridge between our worlds, line by line, like the rope bridges in the mountains that are woven out of blades of grass."

Delenn's father had delighted in taking her on those, and she had not been afraid of the chasm below as long as he held her hand. The dried grass had smelled sweet in the summer sun. How long since she'd felt the high summer sun of Minbar on her face? Delenn didn't remember. "We need that bridge," Delenn said. "There is too much fear and too little understanding between our peoples."

"And yet we are bound," Mayan said. She sat up suddenly and looked at Delenn's face as though she had an answer or a secret. "By the war?"

"By the war," Delenn agreed mildly, for even a Shaal was not permitted to know of the eddies the Council had discovered in the river of souls. "Commander Sinclair will be at your performance tonight. You must look at him, and tell me what you see."

Mayan laughed at the apparent shift in conversation. "And what do you see, when you look at Commander Sinclair, my friend?"

"The war," Delenn said shortly. It was what Sinclair saw when he looked at her.

"And his war dead?" Mayan asked. The tea had grown cold between them, but Mayan finished her cup.

"Not that I have ever seen," Delenn said. "I have often wondered what those words meant."

She had once asked Doctor Franklin about human ghosts, and had been shocked to hear that he didn't believe in them, and felt that anyone who did was in need of spiritual healing. Doctor Franklin hadn't believed in Shagh-toth either.

Sinclair had said he believed that when the soul left the body it went either to eternal reward or eternal suffering, but would not remain sundered from the body. Nor, he said, did they return to be born again. He'd said to ask Takashima about Buddhism, but Delenn had never had the chance.

Ivanova had told Delenn that she believed that the station was packed with sundered souls from the core to the hull, and that there was no other explanation for anything that "went on around here." Delenn believed, but was not entirely sure, that Ivanova had been joking.

"Your poem, 'Dawn at the River,' will you read it on Earth?"

"Perhaps," Mayan said. "It has changed since you heard it, and will change again now that I've met the humans."

"Could I hear it as it is now?" Delenn asked.

Mayan stood, arched her back in a stretch, her robes pulling across her body, paced swiftly across the room three times, and then began to recite.

*** * ***

"I am sorry, Delenn," Lennier said.

"For what are you apologising?" she asked. Delenn had been attempting to meditate, but peace and centring had not come to her, not after the day she had experienced.

"I was unable to obtain an appointment with Lady Ladira before she departed," Lennier explained. He was looking at his feet, and Delenn didn't bother to tell him to look up, but let him have his regrets. "Mr. Cotto was quite emphatic that such a meeting would not be appropriate, and I was unable to contact Lord Kiro or Ambassador Mollari to over rule him."

"Ah," Delenn had forgotten her request of Lennier. It had been days ago, before the raiders and before Mr. Morden. "It is no great matter," she said, "merely curiosity. I have never met a Centauri prophetess." She stood and contemplated the crystalline device, still in its beginning stages.

She had wanted to know what would happen to her soul after the change. After the better part of a lifetime, Mayan's words still tugged at her. If Sinclair's caste was correct, Delenn suspected that she would face an eternity of suffering. If Ivanova was, perhaps Delenn would linger on Babylon 5 until the end of time.

"There will be another time," Delenn told Lennier. "And if there is not, it will not make a difference if I spoke with Lady Ladira or not."

Lennier looked up. Delenn had known him for such a short time, but already he could sense her moods. "You speak as though our time is running short."

It was difficult to know how, exactly to place the crystals, but Delenn stood and studied the device. "You made an appointment with a human, a Mr. Morden," Delenn said.

"Was I wrong to do so?" Lennier asked. He hadn't pressed her about the device yet, but he hovered over it now, face full of concern. "He said he was interested in a cultural exchange."

"You acted correctly," Delenn assured him, "but I will not see him again, should he ask. I suspect he will not ask. I believe that I learned far more from him than he did from me."

"May I ask what you learned?"

"When the time is right," Delenn answered. She had yet to decide what such an open approach by the Shadows meant and her head still ached from feeling them so near.

Delenn had finally met a human who carried the dead with him. Though she didn't believe that it had been in the same way that Mayan had meant in years past, it did not matter now.

The Shadows walked the starlanes again, and sooner than Delenn had feared. It no longer mattered what the fate of human souls was, or Minbari, or her own. The river of souls had joined their two peoples, and she knew that the reason had been to fight this coming war together.

Delenn's sole duty now was to ensure that they did.


End file.
